[A History of American Christianity by Leonard Woolsey Bacon]@TWC D-Link book
A History of American Christianity

CHAPTER XI
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In the pile were many favorite books of devotion, including works of Flavel, Beveridge, Henry, and like venerated names, and the sentence was announced with a loud voice, "that the smoke of the torments of such of the authors of the above-said books as died in the same belief as when they set them out was now ascending in hell, in like manner as they saw the smoke of these books arise."[171:1] The public fever and delirium was passing its crisis.

A little more than a year from this time, Davenport, who had been treated by his brethren with much forbearance and had twice been released from public process as _non compos mentis_, recovered his reason at the same time with his bodily health, and published an unreserved and affectionate acknowledgment of the wrong that he had done under the influence of a spirit of delusion which he had mistaken for the Spirit of truth.

Those who had gone furthest with him in his excesses returned to a more sober and brotherly mind, and soon no visible trace remained of the wild storm of enthusiasm that had swept over New England, except a few languishing schisms in country towns of Connecticut.
As in the middle colonies, the revival had brought division in New England.

But, after the New England fashion, it was division merely into ways of thinking, not into sects.

Central in the agitated scene is the calm figure of Edwards, uniting the faith and zeal of an apostle with the acuteness of a philosopher, and applying the exquisite powers of his intellect to discriminate between a divine work and its human or Satanic admixtures, and between true and spurious religious affections.


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